An Envoy Of Deliverance

From the time that the Tsar had received the conditional declaration
of war from the President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in America to
nightfall on the 29th of November, when the surrender of the capital of
the British Empire was considered to be a matter of a few days only, the
Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the League was absolutely in the
dark, not only as to the actual intentions of the Terrorists, if they
had any, but also as to the doings of his allies in America.

According to the stipulations arranged between himself and the
confidential agent of the American Government, the blockading flotilla
of dynamite cruisers ought to have sailed from America as soon as the
cypher message containing the news of the battle of Dover reached New
York. The message had been duly sent viá Queenstown and New York, and
had been acknowledged in the usual way, but no definite reply had come
to it, and a month had elapsed without the appearance of the promised
squadron. The explanation of this will be readily guessed. The American
end of the Queenstown cable had been reconnected with Washington, but it
was under the absolute control of Tremayne, who permitted no one to use
it save himself.

Other messages had been sent to which no reply had been received, and a
swift French cruiser, which had been launched at Brest since the battle
of Dover, had been despatched across the Atlantic to discover the reason
of this strange silence. She had gone, but she had never returned. The
Atlantic highway appeared to be barred by some invisible force. No
vessels came from the westward, and those which started from the east
were never heard of again.

Tired of reading? Add this page to your Bookmarks or Favorites and finish it later.

His Majesty had treated the summons of the President of the Federation
with silent contempt, just as such a victorious autocrat might have been
expected to do. True, he knew the terrific power wielded by the
Terrorists through their aerial fleet, and he had an uncomfortable
conviction, which refused to be entirely stifled, that in the days to
come he would have to reckon with them and it.

But that a member of the Terrorist Brotherhood could by any possible
means have placed himself at the head of any body of men sufficiently
numerous or well-disciplined to make them a force to be seriously
reckoned with in military warfare, his Majesty had never for a moment
believed.

And, more than this, however disquieting might be the uncertainty due to
the ominous silence on the other side of the Atlantic, and the
non-arrival of the expected fleet, there stood the great and significant
fact that the army of the League had been permitted, without molestation
either from the Terrorists or the Federation in whose name they had
presumed to declare war upon him, not only to destroy what remained of
the British fleet, but to completely invest the very capital of
Anglo-Saxondom itself.

All this had been done; the sacred soil of Britain itself had been
violated by the invading hosts; the army of defence had been slowly, and
at a tremendous sacrifice of life on both sides, forced back from line
after line, and position after position, into the city itself; his
batteries were raining their hail of shot and shell from the heights
round London, and his aerostats were hurling ruin from the sky upon the
crowded millions locked up in the beleaguered space; and yet the man who
had presumed to tell him that the hour in which he set foot on British
soil would be the last of his Empire, had done absolutely nothing to
interrupt the march of conquest.